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THEORY ON DEMAND
Image 7 – Johannes Gumpp: Self-portrait (1646, Uffizi, Wikimedia, work in the public domain).
The invention of photography, according to Derrida, thus, is twofold.176 Besides being a technical intervention, photography is also a discovery or a revelation of what is already there, by which it re-invents a definition of the Other. A self-portrait thus would mean inventing the self as the Other. When recording a self-portrait, the photographer is becoming his own object. He objectifies himself, which is actually impossible. To paraphrase Derrida’s claim; one can see oneself as being seen, but I can never see myself seeing.177 And further he noted; One thinks that the portrait captures the eyes, the gaze that is, among other things, that for which something like photography [de la photographie] exists. The gaze is presumed to be what the subject himself cannot see in his own life. When one looks at oneself in a mirror, one sees oneself either as seen or as seeing but never as both at the same time. One believes that in principle the camera — photographic or cinematographic — should capture or hold a gaze which the looking eyes cannot see.178 Contrary to the media of etching and painting, photography is a medium with an uninterrupted continuity between the object and the subject of the photograph. Speaking in terms of optics, it is the unbroken ray/wave of light allowing and conditioning the viewing process, simultaneously imprinting the image on the film or sensor of the camera. For that capacity, photographic medium was consequently interpreted as a direct imprint of nature onto the film, since the very invention of the medium.179 This medium is necessarily limited in its objectifying qualities, which, as a consequence, leads to a larger subjectivization of the otherwise objective medium. 176 Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, trans. Jeff fort, Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2010. 177 Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature. 178 Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature, p. 31. 179 Henry Fox Talbot, Pencil of Nature, London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, Project Gutenberg, 2010 (1844).